Ask ten people whether a website design is good and you will get ten opinions. Ask them why and you will mostly get taste. The colours feel modern. The photography is nice. The homepage has a big video. None of that tells you whether the site is doing its job, which is why so many businesses spend serious money on a website design that looks better than the old one and performs exactly the same.
We think the industry has this backwards. Pretty is a judgement. Good is a measurement.
Over ten years of building websites for businesses in Geelong, Melbourne and around Australia, we have found that the sites which actually move the numbers all pass the same five tests. Each one has a threshold you can check. Some of those thresholds are published by Google, some by the body that writes the global accessibility standard, and some come from independent research into how people behave on the web. None of them care whether you like the shade of blue.
This is our published standard for what makes a website design good in 2026. Read it as a scoring sheet for the site you already own. By the end you should be able to tell whether your website is genuinely good, or just nicely dressed.
Test one, does the page survive five seconds
Visual hierarchy is not decoration. It is a prediction about where someone’s eyes will go and in what order, and whether the most important thing on the page is the thing they see first.
The evidence here is older than most marketers realise. Nielsen Norman Group’s eyetracking research found people scan web pages in an F-shaped pattern, fixating heavily on the top lines and then reading progressively less as they move down the left edge. The part that gets skipped is the important bit. When NN/g revisited the finding, they made clear that F-scanning is not a law of nature. It is a fallback. It is what people do when a page gives them no structure worth following.
Which means a page with real hierarchy earns a different scan pattern. That is the whole game.
The practical check is simple. Open your homepage, look away, then look back for five seconds and close the tab. Can you say what the business does, who it is for, and what you are meant to do next? If you have to scroll or squint or hunt, the hierarchy is not doing its job, no matter how tidy the layout looks.
The mechanism behind good hierarchy is usually space rather than size. Designers new to the craft tend to make the important thing bigger. Experienced ones make everything around it quieter. We have written separately about the role of white space in web design because it is the single most underused tool in the kit. Space is not wasted room. It is how you tell someone where to look without shouting.
The pass mark. A first-time visitor can state your offer and your next step after five seconds on the page.
Test two, is there one conversion path or four
Most business websites do not have a conversion problem. They have a competing paths problem.
A conversion path is the shortest defensible sequence from someone wanting something to someone doing something. One path per page. When a homepage offers a phone number, a contact form, a brochure download, a live chat bubble and a newsletter signup all at once, it has not given the visitor five options. It has given them a decision they did not want to make, and the most common response to a decision like that is to make none at all.
E-commerce shows the cost of this most clearly. Baymard Institute’s rolling analysis of independent studies puts the average documented cart abandonment rate at around 70%, and the reasons they record are not marketing reasons. Unexpected extra costs appearing late, being forced to create an account, and a checkout that is too long or too complicated all sit near the top. Those are design decisions. Someone chose to hide the shipping cost until step three. Someone chose to make the account mandatory. A more attractive checkout would not have fixed a single one of them.
The same logic applies to a service business with no cart at all. If your quote request form asks for eleven fields when four would do, you have built the service equivalent of a bad checkout.
Our rule is that every page should have one primary action, one supporting action at most, and nothing else that looks clickable enough to compete. If you are working through this on your own site, our guide on how to design a website that converts goes deeper on call to action placement, social proof positioning and the small friction points that quietly cost you enquiries.
The pass mark. Every page has one primary action, and you can name it without opening the page.
Test three, does it pass Core Web Vitals with real users
This is the pillar with published pass and fail lines, which is exactly why we like it.
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure three things about the experience of loading and using a page. Largest Contentful Paint measures how long the main content takes to appear, and good is 2.5 seconds or less. Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks, and good is 200 milliseconds or less. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps around while it loads, and good is 0.1 or less.
Two details matter more than the numbers themselves.
The first is that Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. If an agency proposal you are reading still talks about FID, it was written from an old template, and you should ask what else in it is out of date.
The second is how the thresholds are judged. A page is assessed at the 75th percentile of real user visits, split between mobile and desktop, using field data collected from actual Chrome users. It is not a lab score you generate on a fast laptop on office wifi. Three quarters of your real visitors, on their real phones, on real regional connections, have to be inside the threshold. Plenty of sites that score well in a one-off test fail on field data, and the site owner never finds out because nobody looked.
Here is our opinion on top of the standard. Core Web Vitals are a floor, not a goal. Passing means you have stopped actively harming the experience. It does not mean the site is good. We see agencies sell “Core Web Vitals optimisation” as though it were a growth strategy, when it is closer to making sure the front door opens.
Worth noting too that Cumulative Layout Shift is usually a design failure rather than a development one. Images without reserved space, banners injected after load, fonts that swap in late and push everything down the page. Those are all decisions made in the design phase and inherited by the build. If your current site is failing here and you are weighing up a rebuild rather than a patch, our complete guide to a website redesign in 2026 covers how to protect what already works before you change anything.
The pass mark. LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1, measured on field data at the 75th percentile, on mobile.
Test four, can everyone actually use it
Accessibility is the test most Australian businesses skip, and the one with the clearest external standard attached to it.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023, adding a set of new success criteria to the previous version. Several of them are squarely design problems rather than developer problems, which is why they belong in a piece about website design.
Target Size asks that interactive elements be at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, or have enough spacing around them to be hit reliably. That kills the fashion for tiny icon-only buttons crammed into a mobile header. Focus Not Obscured means that when someone tabs through your page with a keyboard, the element they have landed on cannot be hidden behind a sticky header or a cookie banner. Dragging Movements means any interaction that relies on dragging, like a price range slider, needs a single-pointer alternative. Consistent Help and Redundant Entry both push towards predictable, low-effort journeys.
The older colour contrast requirements still apply and still catch people out. Normal text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background, and large text at least 3 to 1 for AA conformance. Light grey body copy on a white background is the most common failure we see, and it usually arrives because a brand palette was designed for print and then applied to a screen without checking.
In Australia there is a legal dimension as well. Websites are considered a service under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, and Australian Government guidance points to WCAG as the benchmark for meeting that obligation. So this is not only about being decent to people, although that would be reason enough. It is a risk question for the business.
There is also a commercial argument that rarely gets made. Roughly one in five Australians live with disability. Designing a site that locks them out is a marketing decision as much as an ethical one. We have covered the practical side of this in more detail in why accessibility is important for website design, including free tools you can run yourself.
The pass mark. WCAG 2.2 Level AA, with contrast, target size and keyboard navigation checked before launch rather than after.
Test five, can a machine read your page
This is the pillar that makes 2026 different from 2019, and it is the one most design conversations still ignore.
Your next most important visitor is not a person. It is a search crawler, an AI assistant summarising your industry, or an answer engine deciding which three businesses to name when someone asks for a recommendation. None of them can see your design. They read structure.
Google’s documentation on how structured data markup works sets out schema.org markup in JSON-LD as the recommended way to describe what a page is actually about, so that machines are not left guessing from the visual layout. Marking up your organisation, your locations, your services, your reviews and your frequently asked questions turns a page of pictures and words into a set of facts a machine can quote.
To be clear about where the evidence stops and our view starts, Google’s documentation describes what markup is and what it does. It does not promise you a place in an AI answer. That inference is ours, and we are comfortable making it, because the pattern we see across client sites is consistent. Pages with clean heading order, real semantic HTML, descriptive link text and proper markup get pulled into AI answers more often than pages built as a stack of unlabelled visual blocks.
Here is the idea we would most like readers to take away. Accessibility and AI-readability are the same discipline wearing different hats. A screen reader and a language model both need the same things from your page. A heading structure that reflects the real order of information. Links that say where they go instead of saying “click here”. Images with meaningful alt text. Content that answers a question directly rather than burying the answer in the fourth paragraph. Do the work once and you serve both audiences.
The pass mark. Headings run in logical order, links describe their destination, and your key entities are marked up in JSON-LD.
What this looks like when it is built
None of these five tests are things you bolt on at the end. That is the practical point.
Hierarchy is decided in wireframes, before a single colour is chosen. Conversion paths are decided when you agree what each page is for. Core Web Vitals are largely determined by decisions about imagery, fonts and third-party scripts made during design. Accessibility is cheapest to get right in the palette and the component library, and most expensive to retrofit after launch. Structured data needs a content model that knows what each page represents.
This is why we design and build every site from scratch rather than dressing up a template. A template makes all five of those decisions for you before it knows anything about your business, and then charges you to work around them. If you want to see how we approach web design in Geelong and across Australia, the process and the portfolio are both there.
Your five point audit
Run these against your current site today.
- Five second test. Can a stranger state your offer and your next step after five seconds on the homepage?
- One path. Does each page have a single primary action, with nothing competing for the same click?
- Core Web Vitals. LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1, on field data at the 75th percentile, on mobile.
- WCAG 2.2 AA. Contrast at 4.5 to 1 for normal text, interactive targets at 24 by 24 pixels, focus visible and never hidden behind sticky elements.
- Machine readable. Logical heading order, descriptive links, meaningful alt text and JSON-LD markup for your organisation, services and FAQs.
Score your site out of five. Anything below three and the problem is not that your website looks dated. It is that it was never designed against a standard in the first place.
Most sites we are asked to review fail three of the five, and their owners had no idea, because nobody had ever given them a way to check. Now you have one. If you would like a second opinion on where your site sits, we are always happy to run through it with you.
